The invention relates to a method of digitally processing images in the form of digital data which can be part of scalar products of vectors with a number of elements, respectively. Especially, the invention relates to methods for the calculation of scalar products in connection with e.g. weighted averaging, filtering or convolution in image processing.
A digital image consists of a matrix of e.g. 256.times.256 pixels, each pixel having e.g. 256 graytones. When processing this image it is often necessary to combine parts of this matrix mathematically, e.g. to multiply a part of this matrix with a given weighting function. In this context scalar products of vectors with a number of elements are important operations.
When digitally processing images for creating a three-dimensional representation of computer tomography pictures these mathematical operations have to be calculated very often. For that reason, for a real-time visualization of said computer tomography pictures the calculation of said scalar products should be as fast as possible.
The object of the invention is to accelerate the calculation of scalar products in image processing.
Normally the calculation of a scalar product of two vectors with two elements, respectively, requires two multiplications and one addition.